In order to perform many modern communication functions, devices must have appropriate bandwidth that permits the transmission of signals. However, large blocks of contiguous bandwidth that are available for use are increasingly rare and thus may be very expensive to use or may be unavailable. Bandwidth owners (e.g., bent-pipe satellite operators), however, often have portions of bandwidth that are unutilized or underutilized. Those same bandwidth owners have portions of bandwidth that are currently utilized, but which can also support a “below the noise” low data rate system as an added functionality. In both of these cases, however, the bandwidth in question may be highly fragmented (e.g., separated into relatively small portions of spectrum), may change with time or geographic location, and may have different background noise levels and signal transmission requirements.